Daylight Music Today at the Union Chapel

What? Wake up and do a gig at rock'n'roll breakfast time? Who are you kidding?
You know what, this event was a lovely surprise for a billion different reasons. You have to go along to one of these!
Outside it was chilly and drizzly, but Daylight Music know how to treat their artists, and they had piled the dressing room full of tea, coffee, quiche and cake. They had warmed the chapel up (did they start that last night?). There were helpers aplenty, everyone knew what they were doing (including us, the artists, because the communication with us was exemplary), so from the outset the omens were great.
The first act was the Perfect English Weather, aka the Popguns, with the pop but minus the guns (that didn't quite work, did it? But this was Wendy and Simon on guitars, with bass and drums in the imagination). Their songs are really memorable, and Wendy's strong, beautiful voice carried them up to the rafters of the chapel and beyond. They have new material that is every bit as catchy as the songs that I was more familiar with, and the audience drifted along with their easy, positive vibe and their irresistible warmth. Rain? Grey skies? Forget it! Magic happens at gigs like this, right from the start. The applause at the end of their set said it all.
In between sets, Simon Fox played ambient music on an acoustic guitar, which prevented the intrusion of music that nobody wanted to listen to, from somebody's iPod. Regular gig-goers will know how often this happens, and it was a stroke of genius to have this instead. This allowed change-overs to happen quickly and the genial MC Ben to get the audience ready for the next performer.
My bit? I loved it. There were a lot of people there but I could tell the sound engineer was doing a really good job. Church buildings can have weird acoustics but what was bouncing back sounded good. It was particularly nice that there were children there, running around dressed as princesses or just dressed as themselves- and lots of elders, too; this was a proper all-ages gig.
Judy Dyble (formerly of Fairport Convention) and Andy Lewis were augmented by a group that included drums, keyboards and autoharp, with Robert Rotifer, who like Andy plays in Louis Philippe's band, on acoustic guitar, and a violin player called Alison who plays with a band called The Left Outsides. Judy's voice is clear and warm, and there were lush vocal harmonies in their music, which I scribbled down as being pastoral psychedelic in style. Just when you thought a song was going to come down to land in a particular spot, it landed somewhere else; for a muso this is like a puzzle that has to be solved, and I now need to listen to lots of their songs to work out what is happening. Judy took 35 years off, and I'm bloody glad she's back again. Their version of Nick Drake's Northern Sky was so lovely it made me cry. There was something in it that summed up the whole experience: us in our coats sitting listening, children running around, people smiling, a lovely chapel in the middle of London on a rainy day, people having bothered to turn out on a Saturday lunchtime (about 275 people, apparently), being part of something like this when life has sometimes been so harsh. Music is a healer, and transcends the musicians who play it. Big thanks to John Jervis for putting this bill together, and inviting me.
The dressing room bantz was pretty cool, too.